Despite its significant user base within enterprises, BlackBerry devices have managed to stay off the radar for malware writers. That may be ending, as Kaspersky Lab recently analyzed four new Zeus-in-the-mobile (Zitmo) samples targeting BlackBerry users in Germany, Spain, and Italy, Denis Maslennikov, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab wrote on the company's Securelist blog. These variants were communicating with two command-and-control cell phone numbers associated with a Swedish mobile operator.

Zitmo refers to a version of the Zeus malware that specifically targets mobile devices. Previous Zitmos variants masqueraded as banking security applications or security add-ons to circumvent out-of-band authentication systems used by some financial institutions by intercepting one-time passwords sent via text message and forwarding it to a another cell number that acted as a command-and-control device.

The samples were three .cod files and one .jar file with a .cod file inside. The BlackBerry variants didn't have any major differences from other Zitmo versions in the wild, other than grammatical corrections, Maslennikov said. The list of commands used by the malware remained the same, according to the blog post.